"Never forget it is real people who live out such tales and bear the price of the telling, in grief and guilt and sorrow". -Jacqueline Carey

Month: May 2015

The slow building of restless emotion
Pulse quickening
Soft gasps escaping from throat and lungs
My heart is taken
Stolen by words
Morphing into fantastic worlds
Spinning their way around me
Holding me gently in their soft grasp
A love affair
Forever bound across typewritten pages

#frapalymo is hosted by @FrauPaulchen and is translated by Bee on her blog The Bee writes. Today’s prompt wasn’t completely translatable, but Bee helped us out and gave us the prompt “falling in love.” I also gleaned from the translation that it was about art and being creative, so I wrote a poem about both.

Thank you to all my readers for the support this month. I always knew I loved poetry, but I didn’t realize how much I loved it until I was forced to create a new poem every day. I will definitely participate again. Thanks again to Bee for putting all the hard work into the translations and making it easier for those of us who don’t speak German. I know some of them were difficult and I truly appreciate all she did.

Embracing the cacophony
As it spins through awareness
Colors pop from velvet petals
Dramatically powerful silk
In the first light of morning
Warbling birdsong echoes
Surrounded by poignant spaces
Of a deep blue lake
Soaring through the azure sky
A destination unknown
To find the elusive answer
Thoughts and whims
A chorus of haunting melodies
Intuition grabs hold
So bright a light
A fragrant blanket
Raging fires ablaze
Along the edges of isolation
Searching for joy
Pulsing softly across my skin
A feather touch falls
As winding miles float by
New growth awakens
Breathe deeply
Enjoy the now
The only choice
Fluttering hearts beating faster
Holding hands and screaming
Bright… safe… peaceful… love

#frapalymo is hosted by @FrauPaulchen and is translated by Bee on her blog The Bee writes. Today’s prompt was to make a cento out of our own #frapalymo poems. I tend to take things very literally, so I went back to every one of my poems and grabbed a line from each. I had to move them around a bit in order to get a flow, but I think they all work rather well together and despite the dark, haunting poems in the mix of all the others, I think it sums up my poetry journey nicely.

“Are we almost there?” How many times did I say that on a road trip with my family? I honestly have no idea, but I’m sure I drove my dad crazy with it. Having gone on several road trips in the past month, I’ve had cause to think about the difference between driving through a desert as a child and driving through the desert behind the wheel.

As a child sitting in the back seat of a car driving interminable miles, there were only so many things to do, especially when I was growing up. We didn’t have iPads or phones to pass the time. Reading only helped a little bit and you could only sleep so much before you were just closing your eyes and listening to the car whizzing down the road and the shuffling of bodies in the car. I was also thinking it could have had something to do with the fact that the speed limit has increased exponentially from the time I was a kid, but to be honest, most people, even back then, ignored the posted speed limit signs.

Regardless, one hour melted into the next and it always seemed to take forever to get from one place to the next. I was thinking it probably had something to do with the fact that the driver and the front seat passenger had the ability to see the signs on the roadside and could see how many miles to the next town. I think knowing how far you’ve come and how far you have to go helps the time go faster. Granted, someone sitting in the backseat can also see the signs, but as a kid, no one really tells you to look for those.

I remember wondering as a child how my dad always knew what to say. “How much longer, Dad” always got a response such as, “About an hour.” I always took him at his word, but somewhere in my teenage years I started to seriously doubt what he was saying. How does he know, I would ask myself. He can’t possibly know how much longer we have.

I feel like an idiot that I just barely figured it out, but as I was driving to get my daughter from Cedar City last weekend, I realized that if I’m going 80 miles an hour, it would take me a little over an hour to go 100 miles. Basic math, really, but it’s made easier that it’s 80 rather than 55, or 65. Zeros are so much easier to calculate in your head. Or maybe it’s just been that long since I was in school.

I don’t know if I like the process as an adult. I still love road trips, but I felt like I had this constant dialogue in my head. Okay, now it’s raining and I had to slow down to 60, which is going to add ten more minutes, so now I won’t get there until… I was more exhausted from my own thoughts than the actual drive. Sometimes I want to be a kid again so I could have the luxury of asking, “Are we almost there” and after getting a response, going back to my mindless sleeping or reading or watching the endless miles fly by my window.

Expectations like walls
Climbing into oblivion
No trail leading up
No compass pointing
The way through
Locked fortresses
Built up around wavering
Grace
Pressure mounts with each
Wrong move
Cracks forming along
Previously pristine surfaces
Pieces crumble down
Eventually leading to
The only choice
Staring through the abyss
That moment when innocence
Breaks

#frapalymo is hosted by @FrauPaulchen and is translated by Bee on her blog The Bee writes. Today’s prompt was “predetermined breaking point.”

In delighted glee and raspy tones
You speak of dreams and bubbles
Joyfully you announce
Life comes and goes without a thought
Our purpose ever fluid
Laughing you tell me
To bounce like a bubble
Enjoy the now
For that is all we have

#frapalymo is hosted by @FrauPaulchen and is translated by Bee on her blog The Bee Writes. Today’s prompt was a tough one; “translate, condense, re-verse a poem,” but not a literal translation. I was about to skip it when I realized my boyfriend speaks more than one language but his mother tongue is Farsi. I asked him who his favorite Persian poet was and he told me it is Omar Khayyam. He knew a little bit of a poem, but he couldn’t remember the whole thing, so he called his Dad. His Dad spoke the entire poem to me in Farsi but he couldn’t help but translate it in bits and pieces as well. My poem is a combination of the meaning of the poem he recited and how it was spoken to me. It was a special moment with his Dad that I will think of fondly for a long time to come.

If you click on the link, it will take you to the English translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and the poem I heard tonight was most likely #130, but my boyfriend said it wasn’t the complete poem he learned as a child.

Well, I'm dyslexic so writing about something I love: Music, might help but it's most likely just full of mistakes. That title is also lyrics from The Drones song called I Don't Want To Change. Oh, my name is William and thanks for having a look.